@NEETzsche
The printer is one thing, but:
Stock market is a pyramid. Retirement funds are a pyramid. ESG is a pyramid supporting a pyramid. Most small businesses are a small pyramids, and most tech startups are industrial scale pyramids.

So, it seems, that modern industries are 10% about production, and 90% about just promising a return on pyramids.

Yes. If you were to reduce production to people's real material needs -- food, water, shelter, energy, clothing, medicine -- these problems are basically solved in the West. They're not far from solved in Eastern Europe and the Far East is getting close, too.

So where does that leave people? People get gradually corralled into smaller and smaller niches of things that machines don't do better, and it's gradually turning out that we're creating a new aristocracy of bullshit artists.

@NEETzsche
Thanks, your elegant and sharp takes never fail to put a perspective to my random thoughts.

@LukeAlmighty @NEETzsche the system is designed around textbook scams that are bound to fail from the beginning. they appear good early but create crises later. the scammers are politicians with limited terms and no accountability as bureaucracies are independent. because they're mandatory and have no opt out they create dependence. societal time preference for the moment increases and the economy becomes extractative, liberties are eroded.

We're in the looting phase, yes. You bring up time preference, but another thing that they successfully did is weaponize Whitey's low time preference against him. As it stands, the correct time horizon, from a game theory perspective, is rapidly shrinking. They just want to keep Whitey in the dark on that. Such is the state of societies in decline.

@NEETzsche @LukeAlmighty there are these two fake ideologies progressivism and conservatism that both distract from the regression in civilisation taking place. people are lead to believe material prosperity is a given, tied to magic soil or whatever.

Both progresssivism and conservatism as we understand those terms today arose from boomers/Xers, for who material prosperity pretty much was a given. Was. Past tense.

@mactonite @NEETzsche
Not soil... The supermarket shelf.

What a great limitless invention